The political effect of our "silent epidemic of loneliness"

The Liberal Democrats have proposed a network of "Hobby Hubs" to combat what they call a "silent epidemic of loneliness", as a lack of community spaces is forcing people to find human interaction online.

These hubs could libraries, community centres and pubs where groups could meet for activities. The network would be integrated the into NHS social prescribing programmes, giving GPs additional options when recommending activities for their patients.

The BBC News report on this plan says the party estimates that £42m of funding per year could help hobby hubs in England stay open for an additional 300,000 hours.

It also quotes Ed Davey

"The Liberal Democrats want to breathe new life into British high streets and community centres to give everyone a place to do what they love, with other people who love it too. 

"It is so important that we do not allow isolation to become the new normal."

This is an important issue, and one that has political implications. Diane Bolet has written about her own research into the decline of community centres for The Conversation:

The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift.

A couple of other links seem relevant too. Here's Andrew Saint reviewing The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. III: 1840-1950. in the London Review of Books:

Edwardian Market Harborough, a town just short of 8000, boasted Sunday schools, friendly societies for young men and girls, a Church Lads’ brigade, a Territorial Army branch, a debating society, a reading society, a choral society, an opera society, a brass band, an angling 'society', clubs for cricket, football, tennis, golf, polo, water polo, bicycling and point-to-point riding, a swimming-bath and a roller-skating rink, and regularly put on carnivals, flower, produce and horse shows and swimming galas. I abridge. There can have been little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough.

And here is Simon Titley, writing in Liberator 331, on the world that the concept of "cool" is producing:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: "sad", "trainspotter", "anorak", "anal" or "get a life".

"Like trying to do geometry with blancmange": My Liberator article on Blue Labour

Move over Lord Bonkers: I have an article in the new Liberator (issue 344). You can download the whole issue for free from the magazine's website.

Nor for the first time, I am led to reflect on how hoary my cultural touchstones are growing. The first series of Reggie Perrin was originally screened 50 years ago - it's as though there had been a Liberator contributor when I first joined the editorial collective whose articles relied upon his readers having knowledge of comedy from the early Thirties.

But don't blame me: I've been waiting for a new generation of young Radicals to sweep us to one side since at least 1990, but they have never appeared.

A Better Yesterday

I’ve finally worked out who it is that Blue Labour reminds me of: it’s Doc Morrisey from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. In the classic sitcom written by David Nobbs, Perrin, deep in the throes of a midlife crisis, seeks help from Sunshine Desserts’ company doctor. They have the following conversation.

Doc Morrissey: Do you find you can't finish the crossword like you used to, nasty taste in the mouth in the mornings, can't stop thinking about sex, can't start doing anything about sex, wake up with a sweat in the mornings, keep falling asleep during Play For Today?

Reginald Perrin: That's extraordinary, Doc! That's exactly how I've been feeling.

Doc Morrissey: So have I. I wonder what it is? Take two aspirins.

Blue Labour, though some MPs claim to owe allegiance to this tendency, is largely Maurice Glasman, and Maurice Glasman is entirely Blue Labour. And the only coherent thread running through the pronouncements of Maurice Glasman (Lord Glasman – he was made a peer by Ed Miliband in 2010) is an ill-focused, Perrinesque nostalgia for the past of his country and party.

Even that is being kind to him when you consider the misshapen catch that comes up when you trawl for his recent media appearances. Among the views he has expressed are that “in order to be truly radical, Labour must recognise its debt to Jesus Christ”; that the UK’s 2050 net zero emissions target is a fantasy that should be abandoned in favour of new fossil fuel extraction while the national grid is taken over by the Ministry of Defence; and that Shabana Mahmood is like Elizabeth I – “She’s devoted to her job. She’s unique.” If Glasman were a social media account, you would have muted it long ago.

Visit the Blue Labour website in search of more intellectual substance and you will be disappointed. The featured post there is What Is to Be Done, which dates from October 2025 and is written in a semi-apocalyptic style: “The hour is late.” Nevertheless, there is something in its analysis that Keir Starmer won a “loveless landslide” and came to power without much of a legislative programme or analysis of the country’s problems behind him.

The trouble with What Is to Be Done is that it’s full of grand statements like “We should bring public services like rail, utilities like water, and critical industries like steel, back into public ownership,” but short of any practical proposals for how such ideas can be put into action. And when it does get close to making such proposals, what we get is an agenda that will be familiar to anyone with a very online Conservative MP: “drastically” reduce immigration, curb the powers of the courts, tell the police to concentrate on repeat offenders. Explore the Blue Labour website and you will find the same high ambitions and shortage of detail in other documents, even its Plan for National Reconstruction. 

All of which makes it a surprise to find Compass publishing a document billed as making “the case for a new Soft Left/Blue Labour politics”. It’s Soft Skills, Hard Labour by Frances Foley, who was until recently the group’s deputy director. A surprise because, though it is affiliated to the Labour Party, Compass’s emphasis on cross-party working and support for proportional representation has meant that Liberals tend to feel quite warm towards it. So sensible is it that it’s chair Neal Lawson has been threatened with expulsion from the Labour Party.

Enter Compass

Lawson, incidentally, shares Glasman’s sense that Keir Starmer lacks direction. In a recent Guardian piece, he suggested that Starmer was promoted as Labour leader by people who decided he was the man to drive Corbynism out of the party. They assumed there was no chance of the Conservatives being defeated in 2024, so didn’t worry about his shortcomings as a future prime minister. He would be gone before Labour got in again. Yet so rapid was the Conservative collapse that Starmer found himself in Number 10. It’s a neat mirror image of the Labour left-winger who said in 2015: “If we’d thought we had a chance of winning the leadership then Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t have been our candidate.”

There is no such clarity to be found in Soft Skills, Hard Labour. Foley’s method is to look at different tendencies within Soft Labour and Blue Labour and then map how they complement each other or conflict across the divide. So we have chapters titled “Postliberal Democrats’ challenge to the Rules-based Majoritarians” and “Democratic Communitarians’ challenge to the Rights-based Liberals”. It’s a brave effort, but her two main concepts are so diffuse to begin with that it’s like trying to do geometry with blancmange.

It may be that Blue Labour has more to it than Glasman’s eccentricities – his other recent contributions to debate include apologising to Nigel Farage live on GB News after Keir Starmer said the Reform leader’s immigration policy was “racist and immoral” and claiming that progressive liberals “don’t want you to enjoy anything, not even sex with your wife!” There is an essay collection edited by Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst – Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics – but it was published in the very different world of 2015, where it billed itself as seeking to “move beyond the centrist pragmatism of Blair and Cameron”.

Iconoclasm

Frances Foley is attracted to the appetite she sees in Blue Labour for iconoclasm, which is an attraction I imagine anyone who works in the very on-message world of pro-Labour think-tanks is likely to feel after a while. She may even be demob happy: her brief biography in Soft Skills, Hard Labour reveals she is leaving Compass “to set up a new programme matching young people with jobs in climate, whilst training them in political organising,” which sounds more valuable than what most think-tanks produce.

Whatever the reason, she is right to say:

The word “progressive” strongly implies that change is always for the better, rather than to be questioned or resisted. It also suggests that “progress” is a meaningful – and crucially agreed upon – political concept.

That is why I try to avoid using this concept, though a stronger reason is the argument put forward by Simon Titley, late of this parish: 

"Progressive." What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is "not conservative" or "not reactionary"... negative definitions. The "p" word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean. We need real politics not empty slogans.

Similarly, when Foley writes of what she terms “Rights-based Liberals”:

They tend to assert the primacy of rights as a priori, not as social constructs created by citizens, but as a first order framework that sets the parameters for what is politically viable. In this sense, Rights-based Liberals see rights as trumping pure democratic sovereignty, setting limits on what democratic societies can decide. 

she is right about the attitude of many on the left towards rights: we should never forget they are human inventions and not somehow ordained by nature. 

There is a better, more pragmatic argument for human rights: by inventing them we increase the chances that government will treat us well. A good example of this is the right to petition for a writ of habeus corpus – a right hoary enough, surely, to win the support of even Maurice Glasman. Nor is it clear how the working class will benefit from any abolition of rights: it’s the powerful who benefit in a free-for-all, as we see in news reports from the US every evening.

But then it’s often hard to see how the working class will benefit from any Blue Labour policies. The only mention of education you’re likely to come across in Blue Labour circles is vocational education: you rarely get the sense that they are much interested in the number of working-class university students or entrepreneurs. What they are telling working-class young people is that somewhere there is a lathe with your name on it and I remain unconvinced that is what all of them want.

Nostalgia

It's easy, and it’s largely justifiable, to dismiss Blue Labour as offering nostalgia for a vanished industrial world, but too much comment on social media from people who like to think they are on the left treats the past as something to point at and laugh. Such comment is all about the performative adoption of approved cultural opinions: nowhere will you see it mentioned that the Fifties saw full employment and record levels of trade union membership or that the Seventies saw the greatest income equality Britain has ever enjoyed. 

One thing Blue Labour has got right is that many self-styled “progressives” aren’t much interested in the working class: it’s just that I’m not convinced Blue Labour is much interested in the working class as it exists today either. Maurice Glasman’s target voter is a white working-class man in a manual job in the North of England in 1957.

Treating the past as a reminder that our current economic and social arrangements are not set in stone and things could be and have been different is sensible. But demanding we return to this past, and demanding it without so much as making a gesture towards providing a route map, is ridiculous. I didn’t get where I am today without knowing the difference.

The belligerent youths are back: The sacking of Christine Jardine

When Christine Jardine was sacked as the Liberal Democrats' spokesperson Women and Equalities and on Scotland, some bright spark briefed the press that:

"We are not in the business of dancing to the tune of the Conservatives through symbolic votes and virtue signalling."

Simon Titley used to talk of the "belligerent youths" who surrounded Nick Clegg. Judging by that statement, they're back under Ed Davey.

Christine Jardine was universally regarded as an effective front-bench spokesperson, and to lose her over what has been called "an arcane procedural matter" - she voted against an appalling Conservative amendment she had been told to abstain on - is poor leadership.

Nor was her vote a matter of "virtue signalling", for reasons she explained in her dignified resignation letter:

As you know, my late husband Calum, was bipolar. Several people around me have mental health conditions the amendment dismissed as ‘minor’, and not worthy of support. I could not in good conscience do anything other than vote against another Conservative attempt to remove help from those who need it the most. Regardless of my personal circumstances, as Equalities Spokesperson, this is an equalities issue and I could not let down those who are relying on people in power to speak on their behalf. The expression of support I have had from members of the public, the membership and members across the House, has reassured me the choice I made was right, and I am content with that.

Some of the other Liberal Democrat MPs who voted against the amendment will have had equally personal reasons for doing so. There were eight: Lee Dillon, Andrew George, Rachel Gilmour, Tom Gordon, Wera Hobhouse, Freddie van Mierlo, Manuela Perteghella and Cameron Thomas.

I do wonder why it was so important for the Liberal Democrats not to be seen to oppose punitive action against people who are sick or have a foreign national in the family. Are their plans to change party policy in an unwelcome direction? 

I've no idea, but already I hear of rumblings of discontent in the parliamentary party and in constituency parties over Christine's sacking.

And to the belligerent youth who briefed the press about "virtue signalling"... 

The Conservatives are His Majesty's Opposition. They're meant to have some influence over the agenda of the Commons. If they had a halfway-competent leader, they would have rather more.

The meaninglessness of 'progressive' in politics

The late great Simon Titley once wrote:

"Progressive." What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is "not conservative" or "not reactionary"... negative definitions. The "p" word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean. We need real politics not empty slogans.

It doesn't even mean that now.

The Guardian tells us that Downing Street is exploring options for ‘progressive’ UK digital IDs contained in a paper from the think-tank Labour Together:

The paper has been handed to the No 10 policy unit to flesh out proposals for a BritCard, which would be a mandatory digital credential that Labour Together claims could help avoid another Windrush scandal. 

But it said it would also help reduce vast numbers of visa overstayers, saying half of those whose asylum claims were turned down over the past 14 years were likely still to be in the UK.

Conservatives will love this, convinced as they are that immigration statistics are a huge underestimate of the reality.

And how will the government avoid another Windrush scandal when it starts issuing the cards? What that scandal showed is that many British citizens lack the documentation to prove their status to the satisfaction of government.

Looking back at Simon Titley's writings for Liberator

The new issue of Liberator was posted on the magazine website this morning. You can download it free of charge from there - it's Liberator 422.

As well as Lord Bonkers' Diary, which I'll start posting here tomorrow, it includes an article by me on Simon Titley and his writings. The photo here was taken during our lunch in Melton Mowbray.

Does a decade make a difference?

Simon Titley was fond of claiming that he joined the Liberator editorial collective in the 1980s because it was the only way of ensuring that his articles were pasted down in the correct order. Whatever the truth of that, his individual take on politics soon became central to the magazine. He was well informed about machinations inside the Liberal Party and then the Liberal Democrats, interested in new thinking from well beyond those parties and aware of the continuing importance of social class in British politics, when a more common view among his fellow Liberals and Lib Dems was that, yes, class existed, but it was rather bad manners to mention it.

Now that, incredibly, it is approaching ten years since Simon’s death, this seems a good time to look back at some of his contributions to the magazine. You can find a collection of them on the magazine’s website and I’ll give the issue number of those I mention so you can read more for yourself.

Let’s start with a characteristic article. In Liberator 351 Simon looked at Liberals’ fondness for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ and asked what they mean to us in concrete terms. He begins by quoting Ralf Dahrendorf’s account of being held in solitary confinement by the Nazi regime as a teenager and how he had found himself feeling “a visceral desire not to be hemmed in, neither by the personal power of men, nor by the anonymous power of organisations”.

It is that feeling, Simon goes on to say, that Liberal Democrat talk of ‘freedom’ consistently fails to convey:

It is because the Liberal Democrats have such difficulty talking about freedom in meaningful terms that I have been regularly referring to the concept of ‘agency’ in my writing. By ‘agency’, I mean the capacity of individuals to make meaningful choices about their lives and to influence the world around them. I define freedom in these terms because it is better to think of freedom as a practical ability than as a theoretical abstraction. Unfortunately, ‘agency’ is jargon in some professional circles but I shall stick with it because it encapsulates the meaning I seek better than any other word I can think of.

Defining freedom in these terms forces us to realise the extent to which the maldistribution of power is at the root of most of our political ills. It also forces us to realise the relationship between exercising freedom and wellbeing. We can then incorporate freedom as an integral part of our policies across the board, rather than tack it on as an afterthought or omit it altogether.

An insistence on agency also counteracts the classical liberal argument that market forces are the only legitimate means by which people may exercise power.

This emphasis on the importance of the lived experience of abstract ideas can also be found in an article about social class that Simon contributed to Liberator 345. In this case the experience was his own:

Rarely have I encountered worse snobbery than within the Liberal Democrats. The symptoms are wearily familiar; the snide put-downs, the supercilious smirks, the casual discounting of one’s skills or arguments. The low point came when a ‘fellow’ party member once addressed me as “your sort”.

My own experience is more benign. If I transgress the unwritten rules in something I write online, then I’m generally told a particular comment “is unworthy of me”, with the implication that I pass muster the rest of the time. I’ll admit the speed with which public school and Oxbridge ranks close is impressive, but it tells us much about why British society is the way it is.

Sometimes Simon chose less ostensibly political subjects. Here he is in Liberator 331 on the tyranny of ‘cool’, and in particular the British middle-class take on the concept, which gives us:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: ‘sad’, ‘trainspotter’, ‘anorak’, ‘anal’ or ‘get a life’.

The phenomenon of ‘cool’ has been examined thoroughly in a pioneering book, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude by Dick Pountain and David Robins. Cool is essentially about narcissism and ironic detachment. Its modern origins can be traced to American black culture of the 1940s, when young black men adopted a defiant posture as a means of defence. It was then picked up by rebellious white icons of the 50s such as James Dean. During the 60s, ‘cool’ began to be exploited by advertisers as a means of selling consumer goods and in the 70s it moved from the counter-culture into the mainstream. But while ‘cool’ people today affect an air of rebellion, in reality they are conforming to commercially-driven norms.

Because he moved back to Lincoln a couple of years before he died, I was able to meet Simon three times in the East Midlands before he fell ill. Our last meeting was at a very Titleyesque event – the Melton Mowbray Food Festival – and it will be no surprise to anyone who knew him that one of his last articles for this magazine (Liberator 354) was concerned with the decline of the dinner party, suggesting that a turn taken by some television cookery programmes might be in part to blame:

The BBC’s Masterchef (“cooking doesn’t get any tougher than this”) promotes the mistaken idea that, for any dinner party host, nothing less than Michelin-starred restaurant standards will do. It makes people feel ashamed to offer a homespun casserole, even though that is much more practical for a domestic dinner party than Masterchefs labour-intensive, chefy food. Another disincentive is provided by Channel 4’s ‘Come Dine With Me’, which creates the impression that the average dinner party consists of incompetent cooking shared with a bunch of arseholes.

If you want to see Simon’s approach to politics summed up in a single piece of writing, then I recommend ‘Really Facing the Future’ (Liberator 349), which he wrote with another of the party’s original thinkers, David Boyle. It was written in response to ‘Facing the Future’, a paper from the Liberal Democrats that had failed to live up to its title. David and Simon described their article as:

an attempt to encourage Liberal Democrat policy makers to think more radically – partly because the challenges that lie ahead require more radical thinking and partly as an antidote to the idea that party policy is at its most effective when it tentatively suggests a few tiny changes that don’t threaten the status quo. 

Liberal Democrats believe the opposite is true. The justification for the party’s existence is to think radically, to force the political establishment to recognise the real world, and to put radical change into effect. If the party does not do that, it will find that people lose interest and the supply of committed activists begins to dry up.

The Simon Titley articles I enjoyed most were the ones that revealed the machinations of those on the right of the Liberal Democrats who saw political success much as Jeffrey Archer’s novels see success in business. To them, it was the result, not of new thinking and hard work, but of a clever trick, a new alliance or a bit of clever positioning. As many of these people work in public relations, as Simon did himself, he knew whereof he wrote.

So his review of Mark Oaten’s forgotten memoir Screwing Up gives us a pretty brutal portrait of the author:

Oaten … appears to have no fundamental political values but merely jumps from one bandwagon to another. In the 1980s, he joined the SDP but can justify his choice only in terms of it not being Labour or Conservative. In the 1990s, he was an überchampion of the Blairite ‘Project’ but can justify this only in terms of admiring Paddy Ashdown’s leadership. In the 2000s, he became defender of the classical liberal flame when he founded Liberal Future and the Peel Group, but can justify this only in terms of opposing the ‘nanny state’ (having presumably taken the opposite view in the SDP). In a Guardian interview on 8 January 2005, he admitted “I only really got a philosophical belief about three years ago” (i.e. nearly five years after being elected as a Liberal Democrat MP).

But Simon also discusses the book’s strange failure to mention Paul Marshall or Gavin Grant, who were important backers of Oaten’s varied projects. He also reminds us of the name of the Guardian journalist who penned a succession of articles which questioned the competence of various Liberal Democrat MPs while praising Oaten as a ‘rising star’. Who can have briefed her?

Simon also contributed a telling account in Liberator 339 of the reaction of some to the outbreak of Cleggmania that followed the first leaders’ debate in the 2010 general election campaign:

As Lib Dem opinion poll ratings soared, one cheerleader for the right-wing cabal running the campaign wrote on Facebook: “So... 26-34% in the polls, almost all the boost down to media skills and leadership not leaflets and target seats... I’ve got to ask... anyone missing Rennard...?” The complete collapse of the ‘surge’ to 23% on polling day, just 1% more than the party won in 2005, suggests there was no basis for such conceit.

To end, let’s go back to 2001 and the very first article by Simon on the magazine’s website (issue 277). Not for the last time, we find him asking why Liberals are so fond of apologising for being Liberal:

Liberals are often pilloried as timid and petty-minded. We sit on the fence and wring our hands. When we rebel, it is through self-indulgent individualism (for example, calling ourselves ‘Jedi Knights’ on the census forms) rather than confronting what matters. 

We have only ourselves to blame for acquiring this reputation. Why are Liberals so embarrassed? Why do we lack the courage of our convictions? One of the main reasons is our faith that everyone is reasonable like us. All we have to do is sit round the table and eventually we can reach agreement. If only that were so. In fact there will always be many people, probably a majority, who are not Liberals, who will never be Liberals, and whom we must confront. Beyond that, however, are groups so violent in their hostility that to tolerate their behaviour is to invite our own demise.

The contempt for Jedi Knights is an authentic Titley touch, but beyond that, I don’t know whether to be depressed or lost in admiration that his words are needed just as much today as they were all those years ago.

"Here is the news from Rutland. This is Edith Weston reading it."

It's all happening in Oakham at the moment. This weekend will see the Queen Edith Festival, marking the approximate 1000th anniversary of the birth of the woman who was the wife of Edward the Confessor and the sister of Harold, who was defeated at the Battle of Hastings.

The Oakham Team Ministry site gives the programme for the festival. On Friday there will be school visits to explore the connections between Queen Edith, All Saints Oakham, Oakham Castle and the Anglo-Saxon burgh of Oakham.

On Saturday there will be:

A celebratory exhibition and other activities in and around All Saints church. Outside there will be Anglo-Saxon re-enactments, while inside there will be something for all ages – an exhibition of the life of Queen Edith, an actor playing Queen Edith herself dressed in royal costume, craft activities, and local artisans demonstrating their work. ... You are invited to come dressed in Anglo-Saxon costume if you wish!  

Sunday will see a special service at All Saints.

The website also tells us more about Edith:

Queen Edith is woven into the history of Rutland as the last Queen to hold many of the manors of our county as her personal possession. Her legacy gently echos down the centuries to the present day, with her name preserved in one of the Rutland villages she held, Edith Weston. 

Successive Queens in the Anglo-Saxon era were awarded the income from a wide variety of estates and manors in order to fund their household and interests. Rutland was a key part of this dower land, which may explain why it escaped being fully merged into the major counties which were being established around this time.

It was Simon Titley who said that all double-barreled English village names sound like American newscasters, "except Mavis Enderby".

I feel sure he would have accepted Edith Weston as another exception to this rule.

Mark Oaten is a council candidate in South Gloucestershire

Mark Oaten, the former Liberal Democrat MP, is standing for the council in South Gloucestershire next week. He is in one of our two candidates in the Conservative-hold Severn Vale ward.

In 1997 he won the Winchester constituency for the Lib Dems. The contest held on general election day, which he won with a majority of 2, was declared void by the Election Court. Oaten won the resultant by-election with a majority of 21,556, gaining 68 per cent of the vote.

He was involved with the think-tank Liberal Future and the Orange Book, which led to his being seen as one of the people determined to shift the party to the right - see the archive of the writings of the late great Simon Titley on the Liberator website.

Oaten was briefly a candidate for the leadership of the Lib Dems in 2006, following Charles Kennedy's resignation, and then resigned from the front bench amid sexual scandal. He did not defend Winchester in 2010.

Enough history. I wish Mark - and all Lib Dem candidates - the best of fortune on Thursday.

Maybe the dead do speak to us, but in their own way

As Lord Bonkers might put it, the dead are Terribly Dead. I've had no sense of my mother's presence since she died, even though I've had a couple of naps in an armchair in the room where it took place.

But...

I was in Melton Mowbray last month and looked for the café where I had met Liberator's Simon Titley for the last time before I visited him as he was dying in hospital.

For a short while I couldn't locate it. It's on the first floor and I was confused because the shop below it is currently empty. But I soon found it and was glad I had.

Then as I turned the corner, the bells of St Mary's began to ring out See, the Conquering Hero Comes!

One of the hymns I chose for my mother's funeral was Thine Be the Glory. I chose it because it's sung to that tune, which she loved.

So maybe the dead do speak to us, but in their own way.

My Liberator article on the prospects for a Progressive Alliance

This article on the prospects for a Progressive Alliance of the non-Conservative parties at the next general election appears in the new issue  of Liberator. You can download it (issue 414) from the magazine's website.

It was meant to be a review of Duncan Brack's pamphlet 1997 Then and Now: The Progressive Alliance That Was and the One That Could Be, but turned into the sort of review you get in the TLS or London Review of Books.

By that I mean that it's one where the reviewer is less interested in the book in front of them than setting out their own ideas. Still, a lot of what I say is in line with the views in the pamphlet,

Embed from Getty Images

Four into one won't go

With its thick concrete walls, the Progressive Alliance control bunker lies deep beneath the soil of… We’d better keep its location a secret, but I can tell you what you will find there. The room is dominated by a table whose top carries a constituency map of Britain and across which WAAFs with victory roll hairdos slide little figures representing voters.

“Less than six hundred votes needed for Labour to gain High Peak,” barks a voice from the gantry that overlooks the room. “Withdraw the Liberal Democrat candidate.” A WAAF pushes some orange voters into the red group.” “Labour gain High Peak, sir.”

And that, if you believe what you read on social media, is all opposition parties need do to win the next general election. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, together perhaps with Plaid Cymru and some smaller parties, should reach agreement to field only one ‘Progressive’ candidate between them in every constituency in England and Wales. 

Some early models of this Progressive Alliance (PA) also included the SNP, but such is its dominance of the Scottish scene, holding 48 of the 59 Westminster seats there, that it’s hard to see what it has to gain from joining such an arrangement. Besides, Scottish elections now see Unionist voters operating an alliance of their own, happy to fall in behind whichever party has the best chance of defeating the Nationalists in each constituency, and the SNP may well calculate that keeping a Conservative government in office at Westminster improves its chances of winning majority support for Scottish independence.

Would a PA defeat a reviving Conservative Party? Could it even win if the Conservatives were ahead in the polls? Supporters of the idea point out that the Tories never win 50 per cent of the popular vote, so that in many constituencies they win despite polling less than the combined votes of the parties in the proposed alliance. All we have to do is put those votes together behind a single candidate, the reasoning goes, and the Conservatives may never form a government again.

Problems problems

There would be many practical problems in establishing such an alliance. The first is that Labour’s constitution has always been taken to rule out any electoral pacts with other parties, though some way round this must have been found at Tatton in the 1997 general election, where both Labour and the Liberal Democrats stood down in favour of the Independent Martin Bell.

A second problem is that if Labour agreed to join an alliance, there would have to be agreement between it and all the other parties over who would fight which seats. Liberal Democrats of my generation have memories – perhaps “flashbacks” is a better word – of the endless hours consumed in meetings between the Liberal Party and the SDP to decide which party would represent the Alliance where – hours that would have been more profitably spent on campaigning, watching Dallas or almost anything else. Even if agreement could be reached in time for the next election, it would be at a similar opportunity cost.

Then there is the problem of what policy platform the PA would stand on – there would surely have to be some sort of agreement on policy to give voters an idea of what they are voting for, particularly if we are asking them to vote for a party they don’t usually support. One idea that you read on social media can be ruled out: a one-line manifesto pledging to introduce proportional representation for general elections. If we fought on that while the Conservatives talked about the economy, defence and education – no matter how stupid we thought what they had to say on those issues was – the Conservatives would win and deserve to win. We would certainly want to secure some movement from Labour on proportional representation and constitutional reform in general, but if we are exhausted after the seat negotiations it would be easier to agree some form of statement promising to undo the worst of the damage the Conservatives have cause on poverty, the environment and the economy.

We should also have to overcome the fact that a PA would threaten to hang around our necks the gaffes and objectionable views of every Labour and Green candidate around our necks. At the very least, Lib Dem candidates fighting the Tories in our target seats would have to cope with being called “the Labour/Lib Dem candidate” on all their leaflets, and even if the other PA candidates conducted themselves blamelessly, we should still have to cope with all the worst policies of their national parties. The Greens, for instance, want to leave NATO, but not while the war in Ukraine is going on. It’s hard to see that rallying disappointed Conservatives to the PA flag.

Would it work?

When all that had been accomplished, one question would remain to be answered: would a Progressive Alliance be worth all this trouble? Parties cannot deliver their voters en bloc to another party because those votes do not belong to them: they belong to the individual voters. Some specially commissioned opinion polls give encouragement to the idea, but the trouble with them is that they do not seek information like conventional polls (“How would you vote if there was a general election tomorrow”) but rather ask people to forecast what they would in a hypothetical situation at some unspecified point in the future (“If there were an electoral pact between X, Y and Z parties at the next election and this resulted in you having only a Y candidate to vote for, how would you vote?” 

And the trouble with that, as psychologists will tell you, is that we are not very good at forecasting our own actions. We are actually better at forecasting other people’s, because we take into account a wider range of factors when we look at them. We wonder how our neighbours will be influenced by the election campaign, but are, wrongly, confident that we are far too secure in our own beliefs for it to affect us.

And even a PA could be agreed, it would contain subtle dangers for the Liberal Democrats. As Simon Titley asked in Liberator 346:

‘Progressive’. What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is ‘not conservative’ or ‘not reactionary’, but those are negative definitions. … The ‘p’ word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean, and that’s a good thing.

It may be that being against the Tories will be enough at the next general election, but in the long run the ideology-light Liberal Democrats need something more to found a party on.

1997 and all that

But maybe we can learn something from 1997, when a limited sort of PA operated between Labour and the Liberal Democrats and helped bring about the rout of the Conservatives. We Lib Dems saw our vote decline by one per cent, yet made a net gain of 28 seats.

Duncan Brack has written a pamphlet for Compass, 1997 Then and Now: The Progressive Alliance That Was and the One That Could Be, looking at the lessons to be drawn from that experience. It reminds us that that the cooperation between the two parties in 1997 was the result of much work, both public and private.

The public work took place in the talks between Labour’s future foreign secretary Robin Cook and the former SDP leader Robert Maclennan talks. Between them they agreed a package of constitutional reforms, which included incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law, freedom of information legislation, devolution to Scotland and Wales (and elections by proportional representation to their parliaments), an elected authority for London, the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords, proportional representation for the European elections and a referendum on voting reform for Westminster elections that gave a choice between the existing first-past-the-post system and a proportional alternative.

As Duncan Brack says, much of this was already Liberal Democrat policy – some of it was watered down to be accepted as part of the package – but the agreement did break new ground for Labour. And most of it was implemented by the Blair government. The exceptions were the referendum on a proportional voting system for Westminster elections and the total removal from hereditary peers from the Lords, where a deal brokered by the former Commons speaker Lord Weatherill saw 92 of them allowed to remain.

When Paddy met Tony

Meanwhile, the private work took place in talks between Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown. These looked at electoral cooperation and the possibility of a wider policy agreement than that reached by Cook and Maclennan.

Tony Blair, says Duncan Brack, was keen on the idea of the two parties backing a single candidate in a limited number of seats, and accepted that in some the candidate would be a Liberal Democrat. Remembering the hours lost in negotiations with the SDP, Ashdown vetoed this idea saying it would appear “a grubby plan designed to gain power and votes for ourselves, instead of one based round principles and what was best for the country”.

This line was forced on Ashdown, who had earlier floated the idea of closer cooperation between the parties, by the Liberal Democrats’ polling. This showed clearly that the soft Conservative voters the party was targeting would be happy for it to enter government with Labour in the event of a hung parliament but were hostile to the idea that it should campaign with Labour for that outcome.

So the parties turned to covert cooperation, concentrating on the same issues and using the same language. They avoided attacks on each other, shared information on which seats they were targeting and jointly gave the Daily Mirror a list of 22 seats where Labour voters should back the Liberal Democrats.

In the event, Liberal Democrat supporters proved to be more prepared to vote tactically than Labour supporters. The Labour vote went up in some Liberal Democrat targets, but such was the fall in Conservative support that we still won some of them. I don’t know if they were official targets, but Labour also came from third place to win two seats we had rather fancied winning ourselves: St Albans and Hastings & Rye.

Building trust and relationships

Duncan Brack concludes from this history that parties should not try to negotiate a national pact. Instead, he says: 

Any level of cooperation between non-Conservative parties will need to be more fluid and organic than it was in 1997, built from the bottom up as well as the top down – hence the Compass focus on local groups and building trust and relationships over the long term. 

This could feature a wide range of approaches – including, possibly, local electoral agreements but, more importantly, cooperation in local campaigns and policy discussions, building a common understanding and appreciation of parties’ positions and potential solutions to the challenges the UK faces in the mid-2020s.

And I am happy to support his conclusion, which takes us a long way from that Progressive Alliance Control Bunker:

Whatever the form a progressive alliance takes, whether it’s an electoral pact or encouragement for tactical voting, the parties that form it need to give an indication to the electorate of what will be the result if they vote for it: a positive agenda of reform, not merely the negative case for getting rid of the Tories.

Yesterday's local by-elections and a progressive alliance

There were two local by-elections yesterday. Both were in Conservative-held seats and the Conservatives lost both of them.

The results also pose questions about the practicality of and need for a "progressive alliance".

Take the by-election in the Frensham, Dockenfield and Tilford ward of Waverley Borough Council in Surrey.

Here, Labour and the Liberal Democrats stood down to give the Green Party a clear run against the Conservatives. The Tories lost all right, but it wasn't the Greens who won.

The victor was David Munro, an Independent who used to be the Conservative police and crime commissioner for the county. Munro is a former Army office who lost his career because he was openly gay.

This should serve as a reminder that parties do not own their supporters votes and cannot deliver them en bloc to another party. And also as another reminder that Twitter is not the real world.

Last night there was also a by-election in the Peacehaven ward of Lewes District Council.

There was no progressive alliance here: Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens all fielded candidates. But this did not stop Labour from gaining the seat by a mile.

The result was Labour 641, Conservatives 477, Lib Dems 32, Greens 32,

If the electorate is determined to get rid of the Tories, as they were in 1997 and as I sense they are now, then it will organise itself to do so.

Remember that in 1997 Labour came from third place to take two seats from the Tories - Hastings & Rye and St Albans - that had been Liberal Democrat targets.

You can hear these issues debated in the latest Oh God, What Now? podcast, where Layla Moran is the guest. I share her view that any alliances must be locally determined and not imposed from on high.

And is it good for Liberal Democrats to taken on a "progressive" identity?

I have seen a quote online from my much-missed friend Simon Titley that exposes its weakness:

"Progressive." What does it mean? The only discernible meaning is "not conservative" or "not reactionary"... negative definitions. The "p" word is a lazy word, so give it up. It will force you to say what you really mean. We need real politics not empty slogans.

I don't know where this comes from, but there is an archive of Simon's writing on the Liberator website.

Let me end by once again recommending the weekly local by-election previews by Andrew Teale.

"Far from politicians not listening, they have never listened more"

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Fifty years ago, the Labour MP for my home town of Lincoln was Geoffrey de Freitas. In those days, Lincoln was a very safe Labour seat and Geoffrey de Freitas was a very wealthy man.

In common with many MPs of that era, de Freitas did not maintain a home in his constituency (a practice that at least had the merit of incurring no controversial expense claims). Indeed, he spent little time in his constituency at all. On the rare occasions he paid a visit, he and his wife would get in the Rolls Royce and drive north to Lincoln, his chauffeur following in a Morris Traveller. When the convoy reached the constituency boundary, it came to a halt. Mr and Mrs de Freitas would get out of the Rolls and into the Morris, and make a suitably modest entry into the city. The chauffeur followed at a discreet distance in the Rolls.

Simon Titley died almost six years ago, but I thought of that anecdote today because it opens an article he wrote for Liberal Democrat Voice in 2008 about politicians who claim to 'listen'.

As Simon went on to observe:

Far from politicians not listening, they have never listened more. In the 1950s, most MPs – not just Geoffrey de Freitas – put in only token appearances in their constituencies, while local councillors were never seen from one election to the next. Yet electoral turnouts and party memberships were at an all-time high. 

Nowadays, most elected politicians conduct regular surgeries and carry unprecedented loads of casework; they are accessible online via e-mails, websites and blogs; they deliver leaflets and appear regularly in various local media; and they conduct frequent surveys and polls. Today, a politician with Geoffrey de Freitas’s hauteur would not even get selected, never mind elected. Yet people still moan that politicians are “out of touch”.

He goes on to argue that there is certainly a widespread sense of powerlessness and alienation among voters but that, given all the listening that is going on, it is doubtful that more of it is the solution.

Instead be recommends the report of the Joseph Rowntree Trust's Power inquiry, which had just been published and is still worth reading.

Simon was writing at a time when the whole party was being urged to listen, but his words still have resonance:

Politicians of all parties must stand for something, not blow with the wind. Their job is to lead, not follow; to persuade, not accept public opinion as a given. This does not mean being arrogant. Politicians should engage in debate and connect with people’s concerns. But they can do this effectively only if they have a clear sense of right and wrong, and they should not be afraid to communicate that moral clarity to the electorate. The people have the right to elect or reject them on that basis. But any politician who has no idea of what he stands for and instead can only ask “you tell me” is unfit for office.

You can find an archive of Simon Titley's writings on the Liberator website.

Liberator celebrates its 50th birthday

To celebrate Liberator's 50th birthday, the whole of its latest issue - the magazine's 400th - can be downloaded as a pdf for free.

There are topical articles, including a look at the runners riders to be the next Liberal Democrat leader, as well as ones that look at the magazine's history. There are also reprinted pieces from such absent friends as Conrad Russell and Simon Titley.

Look too for an important announcement about Liberator's future.

To think, if I hadn't met John Tilley at a Kingston Liberals barbecue in the summer of 1983, I might never have got involved with it.

I am voting for Mark Pack as Lib Dem president

Liberal Democrat members will have received an email giving them details of how to vote online in the party's internal elections. The polls close at 5pm on Friday 8 November.

So many people tried to vote this morning that the system fell over, so I have decided to wait until things calm down.

When they do, I shall be voting for Mark Pack as party president.

Because:

• I have known him since the glory days of Lib Dem blogging.
• He knows the party inside out.
• He is a strong organiser and campaigner.
• Along with David Howarth, he has pushed for the party to build a core of liberal supporters rather than try to be all things to all people. (Simon Titley was calling for this back in 2004.)

And there is one negative reason:

• Christine Jardine is an impressive MP, but I have never believed that party president is a job for an MP.

Getty Images and anonymous comments: Two bits of Liberal England housekeeping

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As soon as Getty Images allowed private users to embed their images free of charge, I have made free use of that facility. Sometimes I even based a post on one of their images.

For the past couple of days, Getty's images have not been displaying on this blog. All you can see is a notice saying the image is no longer available for use.

Except, when you go to the Getty site you find the image is still there and is still available for use.

I shall not embed any more Getty images until this glitch has been fixed. When it has been, a pig will appear above every time you read this post.

******

Having a comments policy for your blog has always seemed a bit pretentious to me, particularly now that most responses to my posts are to be found on Twitter - you follow me here.

I have always deleted spam comments, and have become increasingly likely to delete posts that are rude about me or accuse me of bad faith.

Now I am becoming irritated by 'drive-by' anonymous posts that attack my views. They are 'drive-by' because the commenter is clearly not familiar with this blog. Have a look at the comments on my Stephen Lloyd post and my response to them to see what I mean.

You can stop people leaving anonymous comments, but that seems too restrictive. It's not that all anonymous comments are worthless: it's just that most worthless comments are anonymous.

So I will continue to allow anonymous comments but may be a little more trigger happy aboyt deleting them in future.

When Simon Titley ran a blog for Liberator he insisted that people gave their real names when commenting.

This caused outrage in some quarters, and it is true that there are people who have good reasons for remaining anonymous. It can also be a liberation: I enjoyed the years when no one knew that it was me who wrote Lord Bonkers' Diary.

But, more and more, I see why Simon did it.

The 5th Dimension: Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In

I know what they say, but I remember the 1960s and the picture we have of it now as a musical wonderland is only half the story.

Simon Titley used to say that if you picked a Sixties chart at random Ken Dodd was generally at number 1. And what I remember from the era is the songs from the shows.

Seemingly by law, every request programme played Harry Secombe singing If I Ruled the World and Stanley Holloway singing I'm Getting Married in the Morning.

And if you went to a friend's house their parents would have, not Ogden's Nut Gone Flake or The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, but the cast recordings of Oliver! or My Fair Lady.

There was more fun to be had at one friend's house as his parents had the cast recording from Hair, which we used to play.

Hair was the hippy musical that made into the mainstream. Its West End production, which opened 50 years ago this week, was delayed until theatre censorship had been abolished in Britain. Wikipedia reveals that the London cast contained someone who is now a Liberal Democrat peer.

The 5th Dimension had a worldwide hit with these songs from Hair. Being good Christian folk, they were not naturually part of the counterculture, but that's show business.

Now listen to The 5th Dimension singing Wedding Bell Blues.

It would have been a very poor result if we hadn't gained Knaresborough last night

There were three local by-elections last night and in one them the Liberal Democrats gained the seat from the Conservatives.

So a good night for us then? .

Each Thursday Andrew Teale published wonderfully detailed previews of that week's by-elections. So let's have a look at last night's results in the light of his preview.

There was a by-election in the Gwynfi ward of Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council, but the Liberal Democrats did not field a candidate.

Andrew Teale gives the results for the ward going back to 1983 and there has never been a Lib Dem (or Liberal or SDP) candidate in all that time, so our no-show last night was no surprise.

Incidentally, the Conservatives have not fielded a candidate in Gwynfi since 1983 either. Last night they did and got 4 votes. The seat was gained from Labour by an Independent.

The second by-election was in the East ward of Bury Council and it was a comfortable hold for Labour.

There was a Lib Dem candidate for the first time since 2011, and he came fifth with 2.2 per cent of the vote.

Back in 2004, Andrew Teale records, the only Lib Dem candidate polled over a thousand votes at the council elections in this three-member ward.

The third by-election was in the Knaresborough ward of North Yorkshire County Council and it was here that we made our gain.

Looking at Andrew Teale's preview, however, you find that the Lib Dems held this seat from 2005 to 2017. In other words, it was a ward we could win even during the Coalition.

Which suggests that if we had not gained Knaresborough last night it would have been a sign that we were making no sort of a recovery at all. 

So perhaps we should not get too carried away by this result.

Let me repeat what I wrote in February:

I love to see the Lib Dems gaining seats in local by-elections and tweet the results as eagerly as anyone. 

But, as I have blogged before, we must beware of confirmation bias – our tendency to notice evidence that supports our view (say, that there is a Lib Dem revival taking place) and pass rapidly over evidence that does not. 

I suspect this bias explains why we Lib Dems were disappointed by last year’s general election result and even more why we were shocked when we lost seats in the local elections the month before.

None of this is to detract in any way from the efforts of Lib Dem activists in Knaresborough or anywhere else, who work so hard for these results.

Though, as Simon Titley used to point out, the fact that we have to work so hard to remind our voters that they usually vote for us is a sign of weakness not strength. We have little core support and thus few safe seats.

Let me end on a happier note by saying how much I like Knaresborough. I took the photograph of it above when, many years ago, I was a student at York.

Goodbye to Phil Reilly - and a note on Liberal Democrat history

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Phil Reilly has announced his decision to step down as the Liberal Democrats' director of communications in a post on Lib Dem Voice.

I wish him well for the future. If nothing else, the remarkably spirited reaction of the party press office to the straitened circumstances of the past couple of years has helped keep members cheerful.

However, in the post Phil repeats a version of party history that has long been popular in Nick Clegg's inner circle.

Writing of the first leaders' debate in the 2010 general election, he says:

That night changed the course of our party’s fortunes, but it also changed my life. I had joined the press office of a party that hadn’t been in national government for decades, with no expectation that would be changing any time soon. A few short years later I would be working in 10 Downing Street.

It is true that the Lib Dem vote did rise a little at the 2010 election - no doubt Nick's performance in the debates had a lot to do with that.

But we emerged from that election with a place in government because of the way the Labour and Tory votes divided and what that meant in terms of seats.

That outcome was a fluke, as evidenced by the fact that we went into that election with 62 MPs and emerged with 57.

But I am more worried that this account give the wrong impression of the Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats in the years before Nick Clegg became leader.

I was sure I had answered it before, and indeed I had.

That post led me to a post on Liberator's blog by Simon Titley. And Simon led me to one on Lib Dem Voice from 2013 by Nigel Lindsay.

Nigel points out, rightly, that David Steel, Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy all faced the electorate with serious and detailed plans for government.

And he goes on to say:

Liberal Democrats were arguably more effective as a party of government before Nick Clegg became leader. [In] the decade from 2000 to 2010, Liberal Democrats were coalition partners in the governments of both Scotland and Wales. The achievements of Liberal Democrat Ministers in those governments were far-reaching and radical. Significantly, they punched above their electoral weight and delivered effectively on their manifesto pledges. Fair voting in local elections, free personal care for the elderly, and no university tuition fees are just some of the party’s achievements in government in Scotland. 

Liberal Democrats also controlled major local authorities in most parts of Britain during those years. 

Finally, though Phil does not use this argument, I am always a little surprised by those who insist that Nick Clegg brought a new professionalism to the Liberal Democrats.

To me, a large part of Nick's appeal was that he had a quality of ingenuousness that is rare in leading politicians.

A drone flight over Crowland Abbey

A drone flight over this little-known Lincolnshire parish church and monastic ruin.

I visited Crowland Abbey and the town's unique bridge back in 2009 - note the comment on Lincolnshire history from Simon Titley on the first post.

And the tune accompanying the video puts me in mind of a comedy sketch I shall share with you presently.

Ralph Bancroft and Simon Titley

Ever since I bought a scanner I have been searchng the house for old photographs.

This one is rather sad. I would guess it was taken a dozen or so years ago at a Liberator gathering in Putney.

That is me looking rather pleased with myself under the hanging basket.

Next to me are Ralph Bancroft and then Simon Titley, both of whom have died in the last couple of years.

The moral is to treasure your friends, because you don't know how long you will have them.

That's not a bad resolution for any new year.

Jasper Gerard is the Liberal Democrats' new head of press

Apologies if I am late to the party, but I have not seen this reported anywhere in the media or the Lib Dem blogosphere.

The new Liberator reports that Jasper Gerard is the Liberal Democrats' new head of press. The magazine sources the news to an email to party staff by its communications director James Holt.

Gerard will be remembered as the party's candidate in Maidstone and the Weald at the last election. This is a historically safe Conservative seat, but Peter Carroll had got a good result there in 2010.

Because of that we convinced ourselves that Gerard stood a good chance of winning and funded his campaign accordingly. In the event he finished more than 10,000 votes adrift.

Jasper Gerard will also be remember as the author of a book with a spectacularly inaccurate title: The Clegg Coup: Britain's First Coalition Government Since Lloyd George.

Simon Titley reviewed it when it came out and was not impressed:

Gerard’s basic thesis is that the coalition government was the product of a carefully orchestrated ‘coup’ by Nick Clegg and his allies. But coalition was inevitable sooner or later. The two-party system reached its peak at the 1951 general election, when 97% of the electorate voted either Labour or Conservative. Since then, the two-party vote has slowly shrunk, reaching a post-war low of 65% in 2010. ... 

Gerard’s claim that the coalition was possible only because Clegg “had transformed his party and dragged it to the centre ground” simply doesn’t stand up. Indeed, the incompetence of the party’s general election campaign, the net loss of seats, and a popular vote share no better than 2005 (and lower than that won by the Alliance in 1983) suggest that coalition happened despite rather than because of Nick Clegg’s leadership. 

And the loss of Short money shows that the party was not as well prepared for coalition as Gerard claims.

Still, Gerard is an experienced journalist and I wish him well in his new job.

This item can be found in the Radical Bulletin section of Liberator. There you will also read of the internal tensions in the Young Liberals, how Nick Clegg turned down a favourable deal on party funding and of a hefty bill the party must pay before vacating Great George Street.

The moral is clear. You should subscribe to Liberator.